Changes To The Script

 

Not Exactly How I Pictured The Deacon

I had promised myself, when this blog had expanded beyond my Autobiographical Inventory of Books, that I would never stoop to merely recounting my dreams, of which I have a lengthy personal log. I have dallied along the boundaries of that resolve before, recording a few story ideas and their origin.  Well, for some reason or other, I feel compelled to completely break my promise and record a dream I just had. Feel free to skip this post if such things annoy you.

Attentive readers of this blog may remember that I had a book published, in rather unimpressive numbers, called A Grave on Deacon’s Peak. Well, in this dream I had sold the rights to an animation studio (cheaply), and my brother and I had gone to see a rough cut of the film. This was my first involvement since the deal had been made, and I completely expected some ‘adaptations’ to occur. Frankly, my only hopes were that more copies of my book would get sold if the movie was a success.

We gathered in a small viewing room with about thirty seats. There were plenty of other people already there, animators and production team and so on. They already seemed a pretty tight team, familiar and comfortable with one another. They all appeared a trifle unsure about who we were, and why we were there. We took our aisle seats on the second row; being on the first row seemed too pushy.

The film started to roll, and I immediately began to see the ‘adaptations’ they had made. Instead of Bob and his family moving to a small mountain cabin out of grim necessity because the father was missing and the family being plagued with various strange phenomena, they had the father inheriting a family mansion in a southern swamp, disappearing under mysterious situations, and the little family having to brave a group of local relatives (many of them living in the mansion) who are trying to squeeze them out with bogus supernatural appearances. Only, one of them turns out to be real. It was more like an episode of Scooby Doo than anything I had written.

Still, I gritted my teeth and thought of the money. I determined that anything positive I could say at the end would be said. For some reason (well, it was a dream) I could see all the decisions and rough draft drawings that had gone into making the film. I was thinking, in effect, of the saying of the Queen in one of the Fractured Fairy Tales, “It’s a beautiful face, but it’s not my face.” The dream ended before the film did.

A little closer, but hair too long, he's not floating, and the nimbus is restricted (it should be whole-body). Not ghastly enough.